It's hard to imagine a war with Hitler in it as being avoidable. The war changed our superheroes btw. Maybe it would have happened anyway but those early Superman stories was about a guy with incredible powers fighting for social justice.
I've cited Buchanan's book on the subject before, but I don't mind clarifying his points.
For example, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 was from the time of its signing almost universally regarded as very unfair to Germany, in seizure of land, slicing up nations of former Austria-Hungary, Czech Republic, and Poland, so that former German majorities found themselves minorities in nations of other peoples. Hitler's allegations in 1939 that Polish nationals had attacked Germans were completely false at that time. But in the 10 years following World War I, these type of reprisal attacks on German people were frequent in the newly formed nations. One British Lord who was involved in the Versailles Treaty negotiations said that what was imposed on Germany "has guaranteed there will be a second world war".
The war reparation payments imposed on Germany from 1919-1923 were so high that the German government was massively printing currency in order to be able to make those payments. The 1923 collapse of the German Mark in Weimar Germany was precisely due to those terms. And Germany had its ports closed and was being starved in order to make them sign the 1919 Versailles treaty against their will.
On the new post-1919 map, Germany was separated from East Prussia, lost about 20% of their territory, and all of their overseas colonies, in oil-rich Camerun, East Africa (now Namibia), Tanganjika (now Tanzania) and other oil-rich colonies in what's now Indonesia (that Imperial Japan seized in 1941-1942 because they needed oil, no longer sold to them by the United States).
Up until the invasion of Poland on Sept 1 1939 (exactly 80 years ago) Hitler was mostly peacefully reversing the unfair terms of Versailles. He marched unarmed German soldiers into the industrial Rhineland and took those lands from France, back into Germany unopposed (he had ordered his troops to run if there were opposition, but France offered no opposition).
Likewise in a popular vote in Austria, the Austians voted (if I recall, 98%) to unite with Germany.
A large chunk of former Austria-Hungary had been given to Italy in 1919 by the Allied nations. Hitler signed an alliance with Mussolini, accepting about 1.5 million ethnic Germans were officially ceded to Italy, to make peace and form an alliance with Mussolini.
The Sudetenland was negotiated away to Germany in 1938 negotiations between Britain, Germany and France, and while Germany annexed all of Czechoslovalia (
not just the Sudetenland, as negotiated) this was done without a shot being fired.
Even in the case of Poland, Hitler negotiated for at least a year. In
Mein Kampf Hitler made clear his entire focus was destroying communist Russia, driving east into Russia and seizing
lebensraum, or "living space" for Germany, populating the vast lands of Russia with Germans. Hitler wanted to (similar to Italy), form an alliance with Poland, and have them as an ally to help him invade Russia. And Poland was governed by a former Colonel who was a staunch opponent of communism, who had driven communists out of Poland in the 1920's after they tried to spread their Bolshevik global communist revolution into Poland after World War I. So there was some ideological compatibility and shared historic Polish/German opposition to Soviet Russia.
What Hitler had proposed to Poland was that they could keep the Polish Corridor and the 1.2 million Germans there, and all Germany wanted was the port city of Danzig (with a population of 100,000, and about 95% German) and to be able to build highways and railroad over the Polish Corridor, to unite East Prussia with the rest of Germany. Which was a pretty generous and undemanding offer.
The obstacle to that was Britain, who had given a "war guraranty" to Poland, that if Poland were invaded, Britain would declare war on Germany and send troops to Poland's aid to defend them. Without this "war guaranty" Poland would have negotiated. But with the guaranty, they would not negotiate.
Both Germany and Britain knew that Britain did not have the military forces to back their guaranty, and that it was a hollow protection. But apparently Poland was oblivious to this and refused to negotiate. Finally, Germany lost its patience, ended negotiations and invaded on Sept 1 1939. Knowing that Britain had no forces to back their war guaranty, and completely unprepared for war, he expected Britain to sue for peace. He was astonished when Britain and France declared war on Germany. It took Britain and France a long time to prepare for war after this. And they were humiliated at Dunkirk in May-June 1940.
If Britain had negotiated peace instead of declaring war, Germany would have turned its attention to Russia, and left Britain and France intact and unscathed. Their war declaration instead forced Germany to pre-emptively seize Denmark and Norway, then Holland, Belgium and France. It was Britain, not Germany, that sank the entire French navy after the fall of Paris, to prevent the French navy from being added to the German navy.
Adolf Hitler (and Kaiser Wilhelm II before him) both admired the British Empire, and considered Britain their natural ally. The British are largely Anglo-Saxon, peoples who came from provinces of Germany as mercenaries about 1,000 years before, and had assimilated into Britain.
Hitler admired how Britain despite being a tiny country had created a naval empire that spanned one fourth of the Earth's surface, and Hitler envisioned the two as allies, Britain its naval Empire, and Germany a continental empire (spanning continental Europe and all of Russia) as two great empires co-existing.
But in the cases of both Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler, Britain saw Germany's rising industrial and military power as a threat to its hegemonic supremacy in Europe and on the seas.
By declaring war in 1939, Britain and France, in an effort to liberate 8 million Polish citizens, exhausted the wealth and resources of the British and French Empires, and even after winning the war, were vastly diminished, no longer able to militarily hold onto their overseas colonies. In an attempt to liberate 8 million Polish citizens, they exhausted their empires, and positioned Russia to seize all of Eastern Europe. In attempting to liberate 8 million in Poland, they only succeeded in enslaving a further 100 million people in all of eastern Europe.
In an alternate scenario, if Britain and France had
not declared war, Germany would have turned its attention (as made clear in
Mein Kampf) toward Russia, and Stalin and Hitler would have exhausted their resources in a war exclusively between them. And once exhausted, Britain and France could have come in at war's end and liberated Poland with little effort and their empires intact.
The European powers (Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Russia, Holland, Denmark, for 400 years had betweeen them colonized the entire world. And only World Wars I and II snapped the spine of that power, destroyed that collective hegemonic power of Europe. Essentially a civil war between the nations of Europe, without which they likely would have controlled the entire world for several hundred more years. Only by exhausting European power in those wars did they become unable to hold onto their colonies.
There are many other examples. Mussolini initially despised Hitler, but isolated and humiliated in the global press by the British Empire, eventually turned to Hilter as the only available ally.
Imperial Japan as well, before and during World War I an ally of Great Britain, who actually helped Britain hold onto a lot of its Pacific colonies in World War I, was scorned by Britain after World War I, in favor of a naval alliance with the U.S. that humiliated Japan, and in a period of severe recession, none of the European powers would let Japanese citizens immigrate to neighboring European colonies in search of work to feed their families. The bitterness instilled in Japan by mistreatment by the European Allied nations stoked a resentment and hunger for revenge similar to that in 1920's/1930's Germany.
World War II was not as inevitable as it first seems. Buchanan points out many examples where things could have been handled differently, that could have prevented war. Or at least vastly altered the way it was fought, and what nations were involved. If the U.S. had not cut off oil supplies to Japan, they would not have the incentive to bomb Pearl Harbor and seize oil fields in Indonesia.
